[Thornton is an American novelist, educator, and critic. In the review below, he discusses Power's integration of past and present in The Grass Dancer.]

Near the beginning of The Grass Dancer, Susan Power's captivating first novel, an old medicine man tells his grandson to remember that there are "two kinds of grass dancing. There's the grass dancer who prepares the field for a powwow the old-time way, turning the grass over with his feet to flatten it down. Then there's the spiritual dancer, who wants to learn grass secrets by imitating it, moving his body with the wind." The second kind of dancing, both a complex art form and a resonant metaphor for the relationship between humans and nature, functions as the armature of this moving exploration of lives infused with the power of the spirit world.

Ms. Power, a member of the Sioux tribe, writes with an inventiveness that sets her writing apart from much recent American fiction. She is more interested in montage than the progression d'effet of traditional plot. Set on a North Dakota reservation, The Grass Dancer tells the story of Harley Wind Soldier, a young Sioux trying to understand his place among people whose intertwined lives and shared heritage move backward in time in the narrative from the 1980's to the middle of the last century.

The effect of the structure is manifold. The reader responds to the narrative as if it were a series of photographs ranging from the crisp images of a Nikon to grainy daguerreotypes spotted with age. But Ms. Power's method has thematic as well as technical brio, for it also replicates the tribal sense of time and connectedness, reifying a world where ancestors are continually present in everyday life as spirits, memories and dreams. There is a fine example early in the book when Harley paints his face with traditional markings in preparation for a traditional dance and suddenly thinks he hears the voices of "the dead grandfathers … scratching the house with hoarse whispers, rasping like static from the radio. We are rising, we are rising, the voices hummed. And when Harley's painted mask was in place, an angry magpie divebombed the bathroom window, screeching, We are here, we are here." This is not magic realism, which consciously alters the world in order to expand its circumference, but a factual representation of reality as it is perceived by the characters—a single plane where past and present exist simultaneously.

The novel opens with Harley's father and brother dying in an accident after a drunk mistakes the headlights of their car for ghost eyes and drives his pickup truck "into their strange light, blinding them forever." From this stunning scene that sets the elegiac tone of Harley's life, The Grass Dancer leaps forward to 1981, the year Harley meets a young woman named Pumpkin, an accomplished dancer who finds him attractive. The problem is that Charlene Thunder also has designs on him, and her mother, Mercury, is endowed with powerful medicine. When Pumpkin is killed in a car wreck we have an uneasy feeling that Mercury had something to do with it. The reader is thus informed early on that bad as well as good medicine affects the lives of everyone on the reservation. Both are ever present as the spirits who chide and guide the living.

Mercury's witchery is countered by the ministrations of Herod Small War, a "famous Yuwipi man, the one who finds things: misplaced objects, missing persons, the answers to questions." Herod and Margaret Many Wounds, Harley's grandmother, are Harley's principal tutors, and while he learns much from Herod, Margaret Many Wounds has the greatest effect on her grandson's life. As she lies dying, the old woman leads Harley to one of his earliest visions. It is 1969 and Harley, who is 5 years old, is watching television, following the movements of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. A moment later, Harley "saw his grandmother's figure emerging on the screen, dancing toward him from the far horizon behind the astronauts." Though he does not know it at the time, Harley will spend the early years of his adult life seeking to replicate this vision, which holds answers to questions he has not yet learned to ask.

As The Grass Dancer edges into the past, women's voices fill out the history of the community, and their wisdom leads Harley to a remarkable moment of reintegration with his ancestors. Besides Mercury Thunder, whose powers are inherited from Red Dress, a warrior woman who figures prominently in the story, there is also Lydia Wind Soldier, Harley's mother. She, too, is drawn in her dreams to Red Dress, whose powerful voice speaks from 1864. The chapter devoted to her is the strongest in the novel. Red Dress recreates the Old West in startling images that reveal irresolvable conflicts between Indians and settlers. Her strength is immediately apparent, her devotion to the religion of her people unswerving. But when her powers to kill soldiers with words and dreams are fully manifested at Fort Laramie, the post chaplain, a deranged fundamentalist named Pyke, enacts a chilling revenge that resonates into the present.

The single fault with The Grass Dancer is that many of the women's voices are indistinguishable from one another. Had Ms. Power found individual inflections for them, the novel would have soared. But this is a small flaw in an otherwise substantial achievement. Written with grace and dignity, The Grass Dancer offers a healing vision that goes to the core of our humanity.